The HP LaserJet blog by Vince Ferraro

On To New Journeys-This Blogger's Farewell

2008-07-18T23:51:00Z

Well … It is time for me to write my “farewell blog” to all of you - my blog readers. After 25 years and almost six months to the day, I have decided that I want to retire from my VP of Worldwide Marketing role at HP to pursue new opportunities and challenges. It was a very difficult decision to make. I want to thank you for making this blog the #1 read executive blog in HP!

This blog is bigger than one person (me in case you were wondering) and it will continue in the future with a TBD named editor and blogger. We will continue to develop and deliver rich and hard to get content that is meaningful and engages all of you.

Secondly, a little history. When I joined HP in 1983 as a senior financial analyst, the San Diego Printer division was humming along in the business of making high quality graphic recorders – XY, Strip chart, and various analog tape recorders for customers you were not supposed to know about (hint: FBI).

As the remnants of the 1958 acquisition of the F.L. Mosley Company, we were part of the Test and Measurement Group and sales were around $200-300M. Not bad considering HP was at $4.7B and not even a Fortune 50 company yet. These products were precursors to HP’s printer business and the site was a full blown manufacturing facility.

When I started with HP, there was no voice mail, no email, and programs were still mostly run using job control language on mainframes. There was one department PC used to run financial calculations with an innovative new program called VisiCalc on a pre-Microsoft OS.

At the same time, it was the dawn of the printer business and I was privileged to work first in finance then in marketing. Of course that was only after convincing the marketing manager I did not need an engineering degree to be a marketer (as it was common in those days)!

In marketing, I had a chance to do pioneering product management and market development work on some of the earliest printing products we had, as we were just establishing the category – the desktop plotters (7550A), HP’s first raster products (the 7600 Series Electrostatic plotters), the PaintJet XL (HP’s first color ink jet printer ironically from San Diego), the PaintWriter products (HP’s first color Mac compatible products), and the supplies business. Around the same time, the Vancouver printer group was launching its first product, the ThinkJet (1983) and bold moves were being made in Boise to establish the first desktop LaserJet printer in 1984 (we will celebrate our 25 year anniversary in 2009).

These were exciting times. I will remember the rest of my career as building the imaging and printing business to the market leadership position it has today and establishing new product categories like network lasers, color laser, MFP’s, and AiO in various marketing management and executive roles in San Diego, Boise, Böblingen, and Singapore for both ink and laser printers. Along the way, I met my wife, Wee-Nah, who also (still) works at HP and shared the joy of working with some of the best and brightest people in the industry.

But enough history, and let me fast forward to today. After 25 years and 3 continents, it is time to say goodbye, arrivederci, adios, sayonara, and 再见 to all of you. Please keep reading and providing your comments to the blog. Thanks once again for your support!

I can be reached at vincel.ferraro@yahoo.com

Did You Know HP Offers Linux Printer Drivers?

2008-07-16T05:35:00Z

It seems you cannot pick up a trade journal these days without hearing about the growth of Linux (and its various flavors) and how it is encroaching on Microsoft operating systems. Although the pundits are not saying 2008 is the Year of Linux, the OS is becoming more relevant and important as a embedded, mobile, and desktop OS.

Anyone who has been challenged to install a print driver on Vista can attest to how alternatives are emerging in the market. HP has some pretty good Linux drivers. Our drivers support the following capabilities:

Printing to 1,439 HP printers, including Deskjet, Officejet, Photosmart, PSC, Business Inkjet and LaserJet. (For a complete list, please see Supported Devices).
High quality photo printing.
Full-bleed printing.
Automatic duplexing (on equipped printers).
Scanning from compatible Officejet, PSC, Photosmart, and LaserJet MFPs.
Automatic document feeder (ADF) scanning.
A Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) compatible interface.
Color and B&W scanning.
PC send fax utility.
Send fax address book.
Photo card access utility.
Device manager (toolbox) with maintenance tools, supplies levels, and status information.
USB, network, and parallel connection types.
Full integration with CUPS.
PPD file provided for Postscript-only laser printers.
Command line utilities for many often needed tasks.
A simple setup utility.
Automated Installer.

A couple of caveats. Not all printers are supported, but 1439 are! In addition to HP Linux, the following other versions of Linux are supported. Unsupported versions may also work.

SUSE Linux (10, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 11.0)
Fedora (4.0, 5.0, 5, 5.92, 6.0, 6, 7, 7.0, 8.0, 8, 9, 9.0)
PCLinuxOS (2006.0, 2006, 2007.0, 2007)
IGOS (1.0)
Ubuntu (6.06, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04)
Debian (2.2, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0, 4.0r0, 4.0r1, 5.0, lenny, lenny/sid, stable, testing)
Mepis (6.0, 6.5, 7.0)
Mandriva Linux (10.1, 10.2, 2006.0, 2007.0, 2007.1, 2008.0)

More information and downloads our Linux drivers are available here and are available with an automatic or manual installer.

Supported LaserJet printers are listed here.

You can get support for the drivers online only at this URL. HP does not provide telephone support for Linux.

Happy Linux printing!

HP's CloudPrint Device Advances Printing Through a Mobile Phone

2008-06-26T19:23:00Z

Yes - you heard me right. Printing through a mobile phone. How do I do that?

I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you an experimental/beta service that allows users to share, store, and print documents easily using your mobile phone.

It is called CloudPrint and it was developed by HP Labs. Perhaps you don't always carry around your laptop, but probably always carry around your mobile phone. Perhaps you received an e-mail on your Blackberry or browsed an interesting article on the web? If you could only print it instead of viewing it on that tiny mobile phone screen!

In the past, you would have tried to figure out how to email a copy of the document to your notebook or synch up you phone to another mobile device. And forget about trying to directly print from a mobile phone directly to a printer (although hp has developed some phone-specific solutions for Nokia).

With CloudPrint, you can take your mobile phone to any networked printer and "print" your documents. There is no need to synch up - just receive them from the "Internet Cloud" and print them to a local printer. There are several interesting use models:

Print email attachments, data or Web pages from your mobile device. Send what you want to print to the CloudPrint virtual print server. The server stores a copy and sends an SMS to your device with a reference ID. When you enter the code on the CloudPrint site, the server converts your data to a PDF, ready to print.
Print documents stored on the CloudPrint virtual server. Before you travel, download the CloudPrint driver to your PC and save files to the server. The server sends your laptop or mobile device a unique code for each file. When you're on the road, enter the code to CloudPrint, and you're ready to print.
Can't find a printer? CloudPrint’s online Find a Printer service can help you locate one nearby. The service also lets you print files – even vacation photos you shoot with your camera phone –back to your home or office printer (I am sure the boss will like that) or that of a friend.

Go ahead and give the service a try an tell me what you think.

Vince Ferraro

Keeping Up With the Needs and Expectations of HP’s Customers

2008-06-02T21:27:00Z

My HP colleague Chris Hawkes has some interesting insights on how hp works with customers to keep updated on their current and future product requirements - Vince

How does HP know what their customers want and why? Sometimes it’s a simple “launch and learn” where we try something and see how it goes over with our customers. However, mistakes in our business where our printers are designed 12-18 months before they are introduced to the market and the pipeline has thousands or tens of thousand of those printers boxed up and ready for customers can be very, very costly. They can also cost us a great deal of customer loyalty.

Fortunately HP has an enormous number of engineers, product manager and other groups who help to put the whole product together, diligently working to make sure that we’re designing our products to be as feature-rich and simply to use as possible. Our employees also know a great deal about our customers and are constantly looking for ways to improve the ‘product experience’.

There are a number of mechanisms that HP uses to stay connected to our customers:

We have periodic studies that ask how happy our customers are with their products and whether they intend to purchase HP again.
We get feedback from the technical support calls – to understand what functions or capabilities are less intuitive than they could be.
We also conduct a good deal of market research to talk to customers, in different environments (home, small business and the enormous enterprise customers
We also do this across the globe to understand how people on different continents and in different countries want their printers to work, what functions are critical and which ones could be taken out, so we can meet their expected price-point on certain types of printers.

Some of the issues that we have conducted market research on include:

Understanding how price sensitive customers are.

We can always add impressive capabilities to our products, but if they’re not expected or desired by our target customers, those functions should be taken out so we can give customers a better price on their next printer purchase

We have also researched want advanced features such as ‘fax to e-mail’ (or Digital Send in HP terms) our customers want

Are smaller companies interested in having these higher end capabilities which have yielded great efficiency improvement for the larger businesses? If so, are they willing to pay more money to see those capabilities built into their products?

HP conducts dozens of market research projects every year; it is our marketing priority to understand what you as a customer, would ideally want from the perfect printer or MFP. We consistently seek out and value customer’s opinions and do everything that we can to see that they are included in the next generation of our products. Of course conducting market research doesn’t mean that we also always hit the perfect mix of capabilities and price for all of our customers. That’s not an easy thing to do, but it is considered everyone’s job at HP to do as much as we can to match our product offerings to the customers’ demands and do that better than the competition. The team works very hard at that. We’re trying to make your life easier and it’s important that we can talk to you, our customers, to understand how best we can serve you – now and in the future.

Best Regards,

Chris Hawkes, Market Research Consultant

For more information on the types of market research that are available and how they work, you can go to www.MarketResearch101.com for more details on the processes.

Technorati Tags: Market Research,Customer Research

HP's New Strategy and Portfolio of Environmental Solutions

2008-05-22T12:47:00Z

I wanted to post this entry today because I am excited that HP's Imaging and Printing Group is making some significant announcements around their portfolio of environmental printing solutions. HP today unveiled a series of products, tools, services and initiatives that help customers minimize their environmental impact when it comes to imaging and printing.

We believe these Eco Solutions are industry-leading and in many cases, represent significant improvements of our products and solutions on many environmental fronts. HP has always cared about green issues and the environment. In fact, most large companies want to look green - to cover themselves with a green flag. However, I believe HP has gone further than most because we can point to really tangible things we have implemented or are in the process of implementing.

Here are some of the key announcements:

HP Eco Highlights The company’s is debuting new HP Eco Highlights label on two LaserJet printers. The new label from HP makes it easy for customers to identify HP products with environmental attributes-

HP LaserJet P4015x,
LaserJet P4515x, and
LaserJet P4515xm (the P4515xm is EMEA only) as well as the
HP Deskjet D2545.

These new LaserJet products and the Deskjet will be the FIRST HP products to include the new Eco Highlights label. It makes it easy for customers to identify HP products with environmentally preferable features and will be used company-wide across all products segments. The Eco Highlights label will appear in places where customers typically look for information on HP’s offerings, such as packaging, the Web and data sheets.

HP Printer Auto-on/Auto-off

This is HP's next breakthrough in Instant-On technology. The printer powers off on its own after inactivity (using less than one watt of power) and powers back on when it senses activity

HP Carbon Footprint Calculator for printing

This calculator allows customers to compare the carbon footprint of their existing printer fleet to newer models to understand how they can reduce their carbon footprint on the environment. The calculator looks at printer energy and paper use, the carbon impact of usage and energy spend based on geography. Look for it online towards the end of June or contact our sales team to work with you to build out some estimated costs.

Clear Packaging Design

On high-end HP LaserJet printers HP will, on average, cut the volume of packaging materials in half. HP is the first in the technology industry to apply this method to printing products which eliminates the need for an outer corrugated box and extensive foam packaging. The outer plastic is made from the same recyclable materials as plastic milk jugs, and customers will have less packaging to manage when they receive their products. HP will use it to ship recently introduced products such as the HP LaserJet M5035x MFP.

HP Paper Policy

Building on its legacy of environmental leadership, HP is pledging to reduce the environmental impact of the papers that the company buys, uses, and sells by establishing one of the most comprehensive paper policies in the industry – spanning both papers sold to customers and those used by HP in packaging, collateral and office-printing.

With some of these enhancements, we have goals to improve the overall energy efficiency of HP's ink and laser printing products by 40% by 2011 and to surpass 250 million cumulative HP inkjet and LaserJet cartridges recycled in 2008, thereby helping the company reach its goal of recovering two billion pounds of computing and printing equipment by 2010.

HP’s Imaging and Printing Group is enabling enterprise customers to save power and paper. HP has helped several Fortune 500 customers see up to a 30 percent reduction in their carbon footprint using technologies such as the HP Carbon Footprint Calculator, Instant-on Technology, duplexing, Universal Print Driver, pull printing technologies and Web Jetadmin. HP IPG is the first business to roll out offerings under the company-wide Eco Solutions program, a collection of eco-conscious products, solutions and services.

More information about the company’s work in relation to the environment is available at www.hp.com/environment. The full press release of this announcement can be found at www.hp.com/go/ecosolutions.

I would like to hear from you on ways you money to print in a more environmentally friendly way. How do you do it? Please share out your strategies and ideas. I welcome your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: HP,LaserJet,Environmental,Green,Packaging,Design,Printer,Paper,Web Jetadmin

Logoworks by HP to Offer Free Blog Design Templates

2008-05-05T13:38:00Z

Interesting developments are emerging in Logoworks, a division of HP. Beginning today, Logoworks by HP is introducing several new affordable and versatile blog design offerings to help businesses ride the Web 2.0 wave and start building customer interactivity and perhaps, even online communities. Along with free downloadable templates Logoworks is also offering custom blog design packages. Businesses can now communicate directly with customers in a more open yet still highly, professionally branded forum that adds a personal touch to any commercial website regardless of the business’ size (did I say free?).

As HP's top blogger I know a little about the infrastructure required to keep a blog up and running. Actually, the writing part is the easiest part of the blog. The two more complicated pieces are researching what to write about (that takes time) and the mechanics of posting and presenting a blog (online) on the web. The Logoworks announcement address the second of the two issues by providing you professionally developed blog templates which will enhance the presentation of your website to readers.

Developed by award-winning designers, the templates run the gamut from fun and whimsical to contemporary and elegantly simple. With such a wide variety of styles, we think you will undoubtedly find a template to suit your personality or business.

It is no wonder blogs are gaining momentum in business. It is an effective way to have direct dialog to keep your customers informed, but also as a way to solicit feedback and establish a two way conversation with customers. There is nothing quite like getting direct "in your face" customer feedback on your products. For example as an HP blogger, I have answered a lot of questions about printing using Microsoft's Vista OS.

According to a recent survey by Forrester (“Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008”, Jan. 25, 2008), 24% of companies have considered implementing Web 2.0 initiatives as a priority in 2008 – and 27% of companies are specifically considering creating blogs.

Finally, there are two other things the people at Logoworks are doing which are also pretty cool. First, they have updated the Logomaker design tool for a dramatically improved logo design experience. Logomaker 2.0, which will be available the week of May 12, delivers an enhanced design experience with a new and improved user interface and updated design choices for the DIY small business owner. This enhanced functionality allows small businesses to create a free logo for their website in mere minutes.

Second as an added benefit, Logoworks by HP is also hosting a free webinar about business-related blogging on Wednesday, May 7. Chris Baggott, small business expert and successful business blogger and founder of Compendium Blogware, will share his insights about blogging for business purposes. The session will touch on a variety of issues from the basics such as what a business blog is (and can do for businesses) to how to setup and maintain a successful blog. Register here for the free Logoworks by HP Blogging Webinar on Wednesday, May 7.

For more in-depth information about blogs in general, I suggest you look here.

Happy Blogging!

Technorati Tags: Logoworks,HP,Logomaker,Blog Design,Blog Templates

The Myth of the Paperless Office Revealed

2008-05-05T13:15:00Z

My colleague Jim Lyons posted this entry on his blog regarding the current and future role of paper.

For the last 10-15 years there have been dire predictions on the future of paper. And believe it our not, people are printing less in many areas as the quality and number of documents online continue to increase. However at the same time, the number of office and home pages printed continues to grow. How do I know this? I am in the business and part of my job is predicting the number of pages that will be printed in the future.

Why are printed pages growing you might ask? I won't bore you with all of the techno jargon and bloody details of it all. I believe there are three main factors:

First, there are many documents that are now printed on home and office printers re-purposed from other printing sources. For example, those photos you use to print in your local drug store are just as likely to be printed on your home printer. Small businesses are printing marketing collateral like brochures, data sheets, flyers, etc. on their ink-jet or laser printer that were once only the domain of expensive commercial, off-set printers (and the desktop printer quality is terrific!).
The second major factor is that the explosion of information - blogs, web pages, digital content, etc. has created a tremendous growth in the amount of pages available to be printed. So even if you print less of each type of traditional document - letters, spreadsheets, etc. you might find yourself printing more web pages, blogs, CD/DVD labels, and online articles.
Finally, the quality of online viewing is not at the level of quality of printed documents. Ever try to read a book online? Was it an enjoyable experience? Well there are some alternatives. Amazon has introduced their Kindle "reading device". Other vendors and some of the big Fortune 100 labs (like Xerox Parc) have worked on this issue from time to time. The simple fact is that printed output is far easier to read than displays. Perhaps some day there will be alternatives that can put paper to the test.

Technorati Tags: Paperless Office,Office Printing,Home Printing,Marketing Material,Photo Printing,Amazon Kindle

HP's Enterprise Printing Launch Breaks New Ground

2008-04-08T19:57:00Z

HP today announced a very broad expansion of its imaging and printing portfolio for large businesses. Our latest offerings help enterprises simplify their imaging and printing environments and improve workflows to reduce costs and enhance productivity, all with an eye towards security.

The new HP offerings include:

1-Six HP LaserJet printers,
2-An enterprise-class scanner for document capture,
3-Three access control printing solutions,
4-Four printing services
5-An accreditation, certification and test program for HP’s software solution development partners.

These new printer and MFP products and solutions are focused on the "managed" print environment. When we talk about "managed" environments, what we are really saying is the device maintainer is an IT department or equivalent organization.

HP is investing a lot in this space because we believe printers and printer-based MFP's provide a superior, more cost-effective total cost of ownership alternative to copier-based products that are still used in many offices today. In addition with printer-based MFP products, there is an improvement in manageability of devices and an enhancement of paper-based workflow solutions.

With workflow solutions, we believe they can be better automated to increase accuracy and productivity while reducing costs. Our strategy is that with printer-based products, we can better enable the following things:

1. Optimize Infrastructure - Gain visibility and control. Create a cost effective, reliable and secure printing and imaging environment.

2. Manage Environment - Free up your IT resources with efficient printing and imaging management tools and services

3. Improve Workflow - transform document-intensive workflows and information management with end-to-end solutions and services

My team and I are excited because these products have been in the product development process for some time and are being announced today. It is a birthday of sorts.

Technorati Tags: HP LaserJet,Enterprise,Printing,IT,Security,Product Launch

Tips on printing less

2008-03-28T14:57:00Z

You might think it unusual for a printer company to talk about a paperless office? That would not be self-serving enough, you would say.

After all, hp is in the business of selling printers and having pages printed. At the same time, I believe too much of a good thing is a bad thing as the story goes. So I liked the PC Magazine article on "Three Steps to the Paperless office?". In it were some good tips on how to print less.

In addition, I found this HP link on easy ways to save money printing, which, along with HP's Print Preview software has some great cost saving printing tips.

The challenge of printing less is complex. Although there are many applications and areas where people are printing less, there is such a proliferation of information (enabled by the digital transformation of information on the web) that even if people print fewer pages per content topic, there is just a lot more content areas to print out. Ever try to read a book or article online?

SmallBizTechnology covers In-House Marketing

2008-03-25T21:12:00Z

SmallBizTechnology.com recently posted about the HP Marketing Resources Center.

Ramon Ray featured the HP Marketing Resources site and describes the key elements of the software, pointing out the benefits of the HP Print Cost Estimator and HP Print View Software.

Ray called out the HP Print Cost Estimator and noted that it can help to determine whether a print job should be produced in the office or outsourced to a local commercial printer. HP Marketing Resources Center contains tools, training, and templates that allow businesses to create and print professional marketing collateral (e.g. business cards, postcards, letterhead, brochures, flyers, etc.).

There is incredible power in desktop color lasers today to do things that were once only the domain of commercial/offset printers. At low print volumes, color lasers can create short run collateral (with high quality) at an affordable price.

From the Web on Print: LaserJet for Personal Printing

2008-03-24T17:18:00Z

Google Alerts just turned up this post by Dave on the aptly named, Dave's Blog, who recently purchased an HP LaserJet 1018 for personal use. We're glad to see that he's enjoying it. It's always good to see happy customers.

We should note for other customers who wish to share in Dave's joy that the 1018 is being replaced by the p1005, which won PC Magazines People's choice award in 2007 and shares in the same high print quality and speed.

Awards are good, happy customers are better. Happy printing Dave.

Technorati Tags: LaserJet P1005,LaserJet 1018,HP LaserJet,PC Magazine

'From the Web on Print' link posts are written by Tac Anderson, the Web 2.0 Strategic Lead for LaserJet Marketing

Conversations with Bmighty.com

2008-03-11T13:11:00Z

As part of recent new product introduction conversation with Fredric Paul, of Bmighty.com, we spoke on a number of topics including in-house marketing, a comparison of ink vs. laser printers, the future of printing, and environmental issues. You can find the complete text of the article here.

HP announces new solutions for the small business

2008-03-05T00:24:00Z

Today's guest post is provided by Kellie Phillips. Kellie is the LaserJet Communications Manager for Small and Medium Business.

HP announced today new printing solutions that enable small businesses to affordably produce marketing collateral in-house, increase productivity and better manage their printing environment. So what does that mean for you?

Did you know that you can save up to 50% by printing your marketing collateral on your Color LaserJet printer versus using a quick printer? Take a look at how Far and Away Adventures, a luxury wilderness tour provider, is using an HP Color LaserJet to save time and reduce their overall printing costs.

Check out the new Marketing Impressions Portal as well. It’s a one-stop shop to help small businesses market and grow their business and interact with others through an online community. There are a lot of great tools, templates and guides too!

Over the next year, we are making color printing even more affordable with new HP Color LaserJet printers that deliver monochrome printing for the same price as a an in-class monochrome LaserJet printer. So you get the monochrome printing experience you’re familiar with and superior color printing in one affordable device.

New color printing solutions optimized for small business include:

HP Color LaserJet CP1515n/CP1518ni Printer series and HP Color LaserJet CM1312 MFP series: Industry-leading print quality with newly formulated HP ColorSphere toner that provides a wider range of colors, higher gloss and improved photo resolution. Printers also ship with marketing resources such as HP Print View software that allows customers to view elaborate print jobs in advance and estimate document costs to avoid the frustration of unanticipated costs and reprints.
HP Color LaserJet CP1215: Priced at $299, HP’s lowest-ever priced desktop color laser printer also features new HP ColorSphere toner.
HP In-house Marketing Starter Kit: Available with select HP printers, the kit includes a sampling of paper types commonly used for marketing collateral such as photo, glossy presentation and matte brochure papers, as well as a Business Marketing Design CD containing templates, images and coupons to provide a jumpstart in creating professional marketing collateral.
HP LaserJet M1319f MFP: HP’s lowest-priced monochrome laser MFP with print, scan, copy and fax capabilities.
HP LaserJet M1522 MFP series: Delivers higher-end MFP features at a low price, such as fast print, copy, scan and fax speeds, a 50-sheet automatic document feeder, flatbed color scanning and built-in networking.
To help small businesses better manage their print environments, HP Easy Printer Care software 2.5i monitors between two and 20 HP printers, both laser and ink, with a single tool. Now supporting most HP business inkjet devices, the software makes it easier to maintain and quickly view the status of multiple devices, set up printer and supply alerts, generate basic usage reports and reorder supplies with the click of a button.

You can view the press release here or full details or the entire press kit here.

Mono Lasers Reviewed by PC Magazine

2008-02-26T15:06:00Z

This week, PC Magazine featured a roundup of four affordably-priced monochrome laser printers best suited for SOHO use – two of which included HP LaserJet Printers. The roundup included the HP LaserJet P1006, the HP LaserJet P1505 Printer (an editor’s choice pick from an earlier review), OKI Printing Solutions B4400, and the SamsungML-1630.

The review praised the HP models for their speed and small size, and reviewer David Stone said that while “the ML-1630, for example, offers a designer look, for those who care about such things, […] the P1505 and B4400 are noticeably faster than the other two models. Any one of them could be your personal monochrome laser of choice.”

There is a great deal of debate, in the industry, in terms of how fast the market (and users) will convert to color business printing. To be sure, the price and performance of color laser printers is declining - making them more affordable than ever. However, if you are not yet ready for color, mono laser printers in this price range offer surprisingly good value in terms of print quality, performance (usually faster than equivalently-priced color printers), and performance.

Being HP at the Lyra Imaging Symposium 2008

2008-01-31T21:41:00Z

Today's guest post is provided by Tom Codd, who recently returned from Lyra's annual Imaging Symposium. Tom is the Director of LaserJet Out Bound Marketing.

I had the opportunity this week to attend the annual Lyra Imaging Symposium in Palm Springs. This event brings together many of the key vendors and technology providers in the printing and imaging business to discuss industry trends and developments. With representatives from Xerox, Lexmark, Epson, HP, Adobe, and others, together in the same location, it makes for some interesting presentations and even more interesting informal discussions.

The focus of this year’s conference was “Technologies Disrupting the Business Model”. Bill McGlynn (Memjet), Bruce Dahlgren (HP), and Jim Rise (Xerox) as well as representatives from Lyra all presented on topics relevant to laser printing. While all of the presenters approached the challenges in office printing differently, the following common themes emerged.

Theme 1: Color printers and color MFPs are the growth opportunity of the future for the laser printer business.
New, affordable color products like the HP Color LaserJet 1600, 2605, and 3505 as well as new low end color products from other vendors have been delivered to market with technologies that make color printing much more affordable. HP believes that providing affordable, reliable laser based products with superior print quality and deliver on the heritage of the original LaserJet is what customers want. Xerox, with their solid ink technology, believes that delivering products with a relatively high acquisition price ($2500 for the 8860 vs $1000 for the predecessor) and low color cost per page is the right approach (see Xerox blog post). Xerox also touted the greenness of solid ink’s “cartridge free” approach, but did not mention that solid ink consumes more than 3X the power due to the fact that they recommend you do not turn it off and there is no real sleep mode. Interesting to note is that Xerox also has several laser based color products that use the same cartridge based approach as HP.

Memjet, a printing technology provider, also gave a quick update on their progress of bringing a new low cost ink based technology to market. While Memjet claims that they can deliver a print technology for very high speed personal color printers at breakthrough prices, they have yet to announce any printer vendor partners for this technology.

Theme 2: It’s not about speeds and feeds anymore.
Bruce Dahlgren (HP) gave a very compelling presentation on Print 2.0 and the enterprise and how printers and the documents they print have evolved over the years. He described how printing devices that nobody thought were strategic are now becoming an integral component of enterprise information delivery systems. See Jim Lyons' post on this topic.

Theme 3: Environmental.
Charley LeCompte (Lyra) and Michael Hoffmann (HP) both gave very interesting presentations on the environmental impact of printing. Michael covered HP’s approach to reducing the environmental impact of printing on the environment and used the event to publicly announce HP’s "closed loop" process of using 100% recycled plastics in the manufacture of HP inkjet cartridges. The process, which went into pilot in 2005, has already resulted in the manufacturing of 200 million HP printer cartridges from recycled materials. The program also lets customers world wide return inkjet cartridges for free using a postage-paid return envelope provided by HP with the inkjet print cartridge box. LaseJet printer cartridges have a similar return program and to date 106 million cartridges have been returned and recycled as part of our Planet Partners program. See Vince’s previous Green post.

Charley LeCompte wrapped up the conference with an eye opening presentation on the environmental impact of printing. It is fairly intuitive that with a printer, paper usage, which equates to trees consumed, is the biggest impact on the environment. What I didn’t realize is just how environmentally unfriendly the paper manufacturing process is. I learned that 13.5 million tons of paper was used by printers, MFPs and copiers in 2007 and that it takes roughly 5.3 90-foot 12-inch diameter Doug Fir pine trees to make a ton of new office paper. That’s a lot of trees! This is why duplexing is such an important thing for each and every printer user. Our studies show that duplexing saves on average 25% on paper usage. Why only 25%? Well, many documents are only 1 page long. Even so 25% savings would save a lot of trees and help minimize the impact of printing on the environment. Jim Lyons had additional coverage of Charley’s presentation.

It has been a very interesting couple of days and it is encouraging to see that many of the issues in the industry are areas where we at HP are putting focus and investment to make the printing experience the best it can be for our customers.